Beginning with a discussion of the right to strike in international law, the chapter explains how most industrial action was regarded as a tortious wrong. Statute provides a limited immunity for trade unions and their officials for industrial action that is part of a trade dispute. In order to obtain that immunity in tort, trade unions must carry out a secret ballot of the members to demonstrate that there is majority support for a strike. Apart from the foregoing, this chapter also examines legal restrictions on secondary action and picketing, and concludes with a discussion of the limited impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 on the scope of the right to strike in British law.

Chapter 1 introduces the main issues raised in Labour Law and its social and economic significance in regulating workplace relations. The chapter introduces the principal sources of labour law in the UK, which include statutes, the common law and European law and the difficulties in securing compliance by employers with those laws. It describes the system of employment tribunals and ordinary courts where disputes are resolved. Finally the chapter introduces some contemporary themes concerning precarious work, work/life balance and human rights at work.

This chapter traces the history of the UK Human Rights Act 1998, from its inspiration in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, through the adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950, the cases lost by the United Kingdom after the acceptance of the individual right to petition the European Court of Human Rights in 1966, the movement to ‘bring rights home’ which culminated in the 1998 Act, the attacks on the Act by media and politicians, and the ill-fated Bill of Rights Bill to replace it, culminating in 2023 with the insidious disapplication of the Act in the particular context of migration and asylum and a new willingness of the government to promote legislation which is incompatible with the Convention rights, coupled with renewed calls in some quarters for the United Kingdom to withdraw from the Convention.

Most biodiversity resources are under states’ jurisdictional control or are shared among states in a region. These biodiversity resources cannot, thus, be characterized as global common resources. The biodiversity loss that is witnessed worldwide has, however, put the protection of biodiversity on the international agenda with a new sense of urgency. The international management of national biodiversity involves attempts of the international community to globally enclose national commons. As many states do not have adequate resources to protect and manage their biodiversity resources, these resources often become open access resources and are degraded. National and transnational protected areas and international gene banks are methods that have been used to protect biodiversity resources. Other efforts include measures to curb or prohibit the trade in endangered species and the adoption of international treaties, such as the World Heritage Convention, the African Convention for the Conservation of Nature, and conventions on the protection of migratory species, seals, and whales. This chapter emphasizes that local and global efforts for the protection of biodiversity should not be used as means to suppress the rights of indigenous peoples and farmers or to forcibly relocate them without their consent.

The relationship between One Health and human rights is both symbiotic and antagonistic. The objectives of One Health align with human rights to the extent that they advance specific rights, particularly the rights to life and health. One Health also promotes human dignity, the foundation of human rights, by improving environmental conditions and addressing threats to health that impact people’s lives. Yet the inherent anthropocentrism of human rights sits uneasily with One Health’s commitment to human, animal, and environmental health. The growing field of environmental human rights may offer some way forward for resolving this tension and advancing the legal framework for One Health, while also highlighting some of the potential pitfalls along the way. Early environmental human rights positioned the environment as a precondition for the enjoyment of human rights. More recently the right to a healthy environment has been recognised more widely, expanding the potential for human rights objectives to include protection of environmental health, and perhaps also animal health. This chapter will explore the lessons that human rights law might offer and the potential for the right to a healthy environment to temper the anthropocentrism of human rights in a way that better promotes the triple objectives of One Health.

Chapter 2 explores the constitutive elements of global environmental governance. International environmental governance works when states fulfill the commitments they undertake under international law, such as the obligation to exchange information on transboundary environmental risks and impacts and the duty to notify and consult with other states with regard to such risks and impacts. Mechanisms of global environmental governance include also environmental impact assessments and strategic impact assessments. The chapter examines, furthermore, how the monitoring, control, and surveillance (MCS) of compliance with international environmental obligations has been modernized by the wide application of technologies. It explores whether green democracy has become a universal aspirational principle, and how the system for the protection of human rights has been used as a tool for the protection of the environment, lending support to the emergence of a right to a healthy environment. Whether nature, as a legal entity, should be accorded rights and have a say on the development plans of states is also analyzed.

In the Introduction, the key considerations, scope, and structure of the book are outlined. The chapter sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of Mind Datafying Technologies (MDTs) and their regulatory landscape. The primary themes and objectives are introduced, providing readers with an understanding of what to expect in the subsequent chapters.

Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for the subsequent legal analysis. Following the fundamentals, the chapter highlights ongoing global policy discussions and initial regulatory efforts, with particular emphasis on the latest developments within international organisations such as UNESCO, the OECD, the Council of Europe, and the EU. It also addresses relevant legal scholarship, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the evolving regulatory debate surrounding these technologies.

This chapter examines the intended and unintended consequences of American hierarchy on partner states. It analyzes the impact of increased state capacity resulting from American economic hierarchy on civil conflict, human rights, democratization, and inequality. The results suggest that economic hierarchy reduces conflict, human rights abuses, and promotes democracy primarily through direct effects rather than via increased state capacity. However, both economic and security hierarchy exacerbate political inequalities. The chapter highlights the complex implications of American hierarchy.

The mandate informs the mediators about key issues required to be able to design a peace accord with lasting qualities. This chapter discusses some of the procedural issues, such as the timing of ceasefires and questions of partial versus comprehensive agreements: Should all issues be negotiated or some left for future processes? A particular issue is the demand for territorial self-government or even complete independence. It seems that Nordic mediators have been influenced by previous experiences in this regard. Examples are given from the Oslo Process, Kosovo, Guatemala, Sudan, and Northern Ireland. The chapter addresses matters of power sharing and the importance Nordic mediators give to the role of women in negotiations and implementation. Human rights, justice, and security for the parties are discussed.

The year 2021 saw record violent dispossessions of Indigenous Peoples across Paraguay. Once heralded as an early adopter of Indigenous land rights and legal protections, Paraguay is now a site of contentious land politics that have garnered international attention and litigation. In this chapter, we draw from over forty years of collective experience working on and researching Indigenous land rights in Paraguay – from litigation before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to ongoing advocacy with communities – and we trace the major legal achievements and document the ways that land rights have been challenged and threatened. We advance a theory of “pendulum policies” for land rights to trace the shifts in state-Indigenous relations, manifesting today as an implementation gap where de jure land rights are typically undermined in practice by state and private interests. In this chapter, we show how the role of international law and strategic litigations have pushed the pendulum from violations towards justice, yet we remain cognizant of the threats, from land renting to direct violence, which push the pendulum back towards violations. This chapter provides readers with a clear overview of Indigenous land rights in Paraguay, and offers recommendations for pushing the pendulum towards land justice over the next decade.

Following NATO’s military intervention and a very wide-ranging UN peacekeeping mission, Kosovo is today the site of the largest civilian mission of the European Union. In the aftermath of the armed conflict of 1998–9 which was fought along ethnic lines and led to mass atrocities and to the destruction of more than half of the available housing stock, the UN set up a quasi-judicial, administrative mechanism to “resolve” property issues, which was called the Kosovo Property Agency (KPA). Staffed predominantly by Kosovo Albanian national legal professionals and a few international jurists, the KPA was entrusted to deal with war-related property claims submitted overwhelmingly by Kosovo Serbs. Relatively powerless and underfunded, the KPA is a paradigmatic example of a contemporary transitional justice mechanism that is understood as a short-term, bridging, technical-legal project rather than a national process of righting past wrongs. Under the increasing neoliberal managerialism of rule of law as a tool of good governance, the KPA was organized as a mass claims procedure. To “streamline” the process and allow for the “quick” and “efficient” resolution of claims, it used data-processing technologies, and decisions were issued in batches of claims of similar legal scenarios. This chapter conceptualizes the work of the KPA as “law-washing” within the post-cold war juristocratic phase of international intervention and international law more generally. The chapter understands juristocracy in a broad sense, as a diffuse and transhistorical moment in which law is used in often fetishistic, instrumental ways to tackle a range of social and political issues previously not conceived as legal issues. Engaging with law’s “dialectics of reckoning” means analytically making sense of moments (that we may choose to call “juristocratic”) of simultaneous hope in law’s potential to propel the currents of social justice and cynicism and disenchantment about law’s incapacity to “solve” issues beyond law (if at all).

Drawing on research conducted in Iran’s criminal justice system, the chapter explores the linkages between mercy in criminal justice and the increasingly global turn away from social justice movements based on logics of human rights and toward care-based appeals, such as humanitarianism. The latter is just one major arena of increased reliance on and appeals to care or “care work” over claims to inherent rights; others include charity, aid, and philanthropy. In Iran’s “victim-centered” criminal justice system, in homicide and other major crimes, the victims’ families possess a right of “exact” retribution. That is, victims’ immediate family members may exercise their right to have a perpetrator executed. In these cases, however, victims’ family members may also forgo retributive sentencing and forgive the perpetrator. A variety of interests – legal, social, religious, and even economic – shape the concerns of victims’ families as they consider whether to exercise the right of retribution by forgoing rather than executing it. While being merciful or seeking mercy may possess qualities associated with a “seasoning” of justice, the inclination toward mercy and merciful grants, such as granting pardons to persons convicted of crimes, is both a legitimation and entrenchment of an absolute sovereign over the judiciary or the legislative branch, as in Iran. As the chapter argues, this normalization of the resort to mercy has the capacity to reduce everyone in society to a potential supplicant with broader implications for the quest for social justice and legal reckoning.

This chapter expands on a series of recent interventions about the consequences of the unraveling of juristocracy at a more diffuse transnational level: consequences for critical scholarship (both disciplinary and interdisciplinary), for the state of (mostly Euro-American) progressive politics, and for the urgent project to imagine alternatives to rights-based frameworks for change and justice-seeking that guard against the use of violence, ethnocentrism, and other expressions of an exclusionary juristocratic reckoning. The chapter begins by summarizing the well-known intellectual historical narrative of notable developments in the wake of the “endtimes” (Hopgood 2013) of human rights and other categories of law that were invested with the weight of social, political, and, to a lesser extent, economic transformation. After focusing on and tracing the afterlives of existing human rights up to the present, the chapter then introduces an alternative vision for what is described as the “future lives” of human rights, a proposition that recognizes the force of the different critiques underlining the profound turn away from human rights in the present, but which nevertheless seeks to go beyond these critiques. Although the original argument for “reinventing human rights” (Goodale 2022) was meant to examine fairly comprehensively the ways in which a radically reformulated account of human rights was still possible, an account, moreover, that might yet prove capable of galvanizing new and more sustainable forms of translocal social and political action, the 2022 intervention nevertheless left certain key concepts rather underdeveloped. As a response, the chapter returns to these key concepts in order to thicken the presentation of a reinvented human rights as a framework for multiscalar social mobilization and justice-seeking. Yet as the chapter emphasizes, this framework does not return “human rights” to its grounding in law – national, regional, or international. In this sense, the proposition builds on the transformative potential of the turn away from certain kinds of law. As the chapter concludes, the case for detaching human rights – conceptually and institutionally – from law seems as compelling as ever, perhaps even more so in light of the violent impotence of the international system writ large in the face of recent crises such as the global COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.